Linux in Higher Education: Open Source, Open Minds, Social Justice

Colleges and universities should move to adopt Linux as an international standard for computing in higher education.

It's generally agreed that college and
university students should learn the fundamentals of information
technology, including the use of operating systems, office
application software and the Internet. It's quite another matter,
though, to pay for the necessary infrastructure--wired dormitories,
industrial-strength servers, lots of PCs around campus, and pricey
commercial software for student use. Now that Linux and open-source
office applications such as
AbiWord and
Gnumeric are
available for free, institutions of higher education can save big
money in software costs, and more than a few campuses and
university consortia are starting to take Linux seriously (see, for
example, Robiette 1999). They're discovering what Linux users
already know--namely, that Linux, compared to Microsoft Windows,
offers an unbeatable combination of advantages, including a zero
price tag, do-it-yourself flexibility, freedom from licensing
headaches, stability, performance, compliance with public
standards, interoperability with existing systems, and a design
that reduces the threat of computer viruses (see Prasad
1999).

As I'll argue in this essay, there's much more at stake here
than money. In what follows, I'll argue that open source software
in general--and Linux in particiular--holds the key to the ability
of colleges and universities to retain their traditions of
scientific and scholarly excellence as they adapt to an
increasingly computerized world. By establishing Linux as
the international standard for academic
computing, institutions of higher education can directly address
challenges to the integrity of scientific research, do a better job
of preparing students for a world of rapidly changing technology,
and combat the growing and disturbing disparities in access to
information technology. The following sections detail the case for
Linux in higher education--a case that, in my view, amounts to a
moral imperative.

Closed-Source Software in Science? Goodbye,
Verifiability

Since science's earliest days, the enterprise has been based
on a gift-economy notion very much like that underlying
open- source
software: scientists receive credit and prestige for their
discoveries, but they do not receive ownership
of them. On the contrary, scientists are expected to publish their
findings in open, public journals, which are accessible to all.
These journals print scientific articles only after a submission
passes peer review, in which a scientist's
peers scrutinize all of the assumptions and calculations that
produced the conclusions. The journal's editor will publish a
scientific article only when the peer reviewers conclude that the
underlying methods are sound. To be sure, the system doesn't always
work perfectly, but--like democracy--it is clearly superior to its
alternatives.

Increasingly, scientists are beginning to see that their use
of closed-source software poses a profound threat to the integrity
of science (Kiernan 1999). Computer software is increasingly used
to analyze research results or simulate real-world systems.
However, scientists rarely make their software available to other
scientists for scrutiny--and even if they did, they often used
closed-source programs in which the underlying source code is
protected by copyright and trade secrecy claims. But this practice
strikes at the heart of science, namely, the notion of
verifiability. To be accepted as valid, all
calculations and assumptions that go into a given scientific
assumption must be open to public scrutiny. Yet closed-source
software makes such scrutiny impossible.

These are the simple facts, from which Dan Gazelter, a
professor of biochemistry at Notre Dame University, draws the
following, compelling conclusion: scientists are
positivelyobligated to
use open-source software, and what is more, the future of an
increasingly computerized scientific enterprise may well depend on
their decision to do so (Gezelter 1999; cf. Wilson 1999).
Increasingly, scientists and university librarians are developing
clearinghouses and large-scale development projects to create more
open-source alternatives for use in higher education (see the
Open Science
Project and
oss4lib).

But the use of open-source software is insufficient. If the
future of science depends on scientists' use of open-source
software, one can very well argue that colleges and universities
are under a positive obligation to move away from closed-source
computing infrastructures as well as closed-
source software. Consider this: many of the instructions in
computer programs do little more than issue directives to the
operating system; this is done by means of the operating system's
application programming interface (API). To
verify scientific software fully, the scientific community may need
to examine the program's interaction with the operating system. Yet
Microsoft refuses to document the Windows API fully and regards the
Windows source code as an immensely valuable trade secret. What is
more, Microsoft has taken the lead in lobbying for proposed
changes to the U.S.
commercial code that would effectively criminalize reverse
engineering.

It's not enough for scientists to use open-source software;
they must also use an open-source operating system. Colleges and
universities can help to assure the ubiquity of open-source
software and operating system usage in science by moving to Linux
as an international standard for academic computing.

Comment viewing options

I do agree Linux is one of the most advanced pieces of software ever built and it's free with great support. Students who in roll in highereducation
courses should use that, it would make the course less expensive and more known because of it's use of linux.

As Linux continues to play an ever increasing role in corporate data centers and institutions, ensuring the integrity and protection of these systems must be a priority. With 60% of the world's websites and an increasing share of organization's mission-critical workloads running on Linux, failing to stop malware and other advanced threats on Linux can increasingly impact an organization's reputation and bottom line.

Most companies incorporate backup procedures for critical data, which can be restored quickly if a loss occurs. However, fewer companies are prepared for catastrophic system failures, in which they lose all data, the entire operating system, applications, settings, patches and more, reducing their system(s) to “bare metal.” After all, before data can be restored to a system, there must be a system to restore it to.

In this one hour webinar, learn how to enhance your existing backup strategies for better disaster recovery preparedness using Storix System Backup Administrator (SBAdmin), a highly flexible bare-metal recovery solution for UNIX and Linux systems.